[vox-tech] Advice for dealing with adobe pdf forms etc on linux?

[Alex Mandel]

I often use Inkscape and/or GIMP to add form entries on top of the
existing pdf and then print to pdf. It's not really filling in the
"Form" and is really not shareable back to Win/Mac users.

Not sure where I found it but it seems I have 9.5.5 acroread installed
via package on ubuntu (says it's for precise though I'm on trusty).

-Alex

On 08/05/2015 12:01 PM, Carl Boettiger wrote:
> Thanks everyone for the suggestions.  It looks to me like qoappa's
> commercial PDF Studio is the best option for me to handle pdf documents
> with proprietary features/standards.
> 
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 3:42 PM Mark's tech help <markindavis at hush.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> Interesting topic.  Motivated me to read around for awhile, and what seems
>> to have most potential is DjVuLibre:
>>
>> (from http://djvu.sourceforge.net/gsdjvu.html )
>>      "DjVu documents download and display extremely quickly, and look
>> exactly the same on all platforms with no compatibility problems due to
>> fonts, colors, etc. DjVu can be seen as a superior alternative to PDF and
>> PostScript for digital documents, to TIFF (and PDF) for scanned bitonal
>> documents, to JPEG and JPEG2000 for photographs and pictures, and to GIF
>> for large palettized images. DjVu is the only Web format that is practical
>> for distributing high-resolution scanned documents in color. No other
>> format comes close. "
>>
>> There's a snag though, in that there's apparently a conflict between the
>> "Common Public License" (http://www.eclipse.org/legal/cpl-v10.html) and
>> the GPL, under which different sub-parts are written..  upshot being that
>> executables (binaries) are not considered redsitributable.  The Ghostscript
>> driver that enables PDF importing, called GSDjVu, seems the sticky
>> licensing issue..
>>
>> (from http://djvu.sourceforge.net/gsdjvu.html )
>>      "If you are determined to compile GSDjVu, you will find much easier
>> to use the improved version prepared by the DjVuLibre team (after all, we
>> wrote this code in the first place.) "
>>
>> I've compiled quite a few packages in my time, but am not top-salary grade
>> in this area.  Nonetheless, I hereby put myself out there as for-hire, to
>> set about implementing this in your environment.
>> But it sounds like this should present a quality Linux alternative.  I'm
>> presuming it's plenty easy to port back out to .pdf format when desired..
>> though I haven't test-driven it yet.
>> The software project overall sounds like the way go for someone such as
>> myself, who's working to migrte away from the likes of Adobe entirely.  And
>> kudos on the foresight of planning to leave the Windows platform, Bob!
>>
>> Another up & coming possibility is something called poppler, the TODO of
>> which says it'll be taking on pdf annotation:
>> "glib frontend to:
>>         - Sound/Movie actions support
>>         - API to create annotations  "
>>
>> (from  http://cgit.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/tree/TODO )  Just
>> noticed on the Okular page, that this is a back-end of theirs!
>>
>>
>> And as for getting form entries to print from Okular, which had been
>> entered in from other machines..  just maybe this commenter was onto
>> something:
>>      "FontForge - particularly useful if someone sends you a MAC pdf & you
>> need to edit it ;o) "
>>
>> ( from
>> http://tuxradar.com/content/best-linux-applications-office-productivity )
>>
>>
>> Carl:  on the Okular FAQ page, there's repeated mention of when one needs
>> to have upgraded versions of Poppler installed, so you might check that.
>>
>>
>> Best of luck,
>>   Mark
>>
>>
>> --
>> https://twitter.com/linuxusergroup/followers
>>
>> On 8/5/2015 at 2:35 AM, "Bob Scofield" <scofield at omsoft.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I purchased the business edition of PDF Studio:
>>>
>>> http://www.qoppa.com/
>>>
>>> There's a version for Linux and one for Windows and Mac.
>>>
>>> It's my default pdf program and I like it, but I have to admit
>>> that
>>> Windows Foxit is better.  I've seen Foxit OCR material that PDF
>>> Studio
>>> cannot.
>>>
>>> The reason that I purchased a commercial program is that I plan to
>>> take
>>> Windows off my computers when Windows 9 expires in 2019, and I'm
>>> experimenting with using Linux in my business.  PDF Studio is one
>>> step
>>> in that direction.
>>>
>>> Bob
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 08/04/2015 10:56 AM, Chris Jenks wrote:
>>>>
>>>>   Dear Carl,
>>>>
>>>>   I recently searched for a (free) PDF editor for linux to deal
>>> with
>>>> the situations you describe but couldn't find anything adequate.
>>> As I
>>>> remember there was at least one commercial linux application
>>> that
>>>> looked like it might work but I wasn't willing to buy it (I see
>>> a few
>>>> listed for sale at this time).
>>>>
>>>>   What I ended up doing was opening the documents in Acrobat on
>>>> Windows and printing them to PDF. The read-only PDF files can
>>> then be
>>>> read and printed from Linux. Of course this isn't a Linux-only
>>>> solution, and what I don't like about it is that I can't edit my
>>> own
>>>> PDF documents without going to Windows.
>>>>
>>>>   Yours,
>>>>
>>>>     Chris
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, 4 Aug 2015, Carl Boettiger wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi folks,
>>>>>
>>>>> I occasionally have to deal with Adobe pdf documents that have
>>>>> embedded forms at work and am looking for some suggestions on
>>>>> how to manage this on a Linux platform.
>>>>>
>>>>> Sometimes the files are just plain pdfs, and I can happily mark
>>> up on
>>>>> top of them with an editor like Xournal and export my
>>>>> marked-up pdf.
>>>>>
>>>>> When the document has embedded forms that already have some
>>> content
>>>>> entered into them (e.g. by another user on a Windows/mac
>>>>> platform), that content does not display in evince.  I can get
>>> it to
>>>>> display using okular, but cannot print it from okular to
>>>>> a pdf output without losing the contents of the form.
>>>>>
>>>>> It appears that Adobe no longer provides support for a linux
>>> version
>>>>> of acroread.  I can get older versions of acroread
>>>>> binaries to install and run just fine, but any attembpt I've
>>> made to
>>>>> print the output (e.g. print to file, or  using CUPS pdf
>>>>> printer device) results in either a blank pdf or ps, or worse a
>>>>> document that causes any editor to segfault it when I try and
>>>>> open it.
>>>>>
>>>>> My current strategy has been to take a screenshot of the pdf;
>>> crop
>>>>> convert the png back to pdf (say, in gimp), and mark it up
>>>>> in xournal.  Needless to say, this isn't ideal.
>>>>>
>>>>> Any suggestions on how to better handle this situation?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Somewhat worse than the 'ordinary' pdf forms are pdfs that have
>>>>> XFA-based forms.  Opening these under evince or okular just
>>>>> shows the text: "Please wait...
>>>>> If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper
>>> contents of
>>>>> the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display
>>>>> this type of document."   While these do open properly and can
>>> be
>>>>> edited in the dated linux binaries of acroread, I haven't
>>>>> found any open source editor that can handle them.  (It seems
>>> there
>>>>> are good reasons for that, as their may be security issues
>>>>> etc with this format, but I don't get to choose that).  Any way
>>> to
>>>>> deal with these?  (Even an online tool would be a
>>>>> reasonable alternative I guess).
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks!
>>>>>
>>>>> Carl
>>>>> --
>>>>>
>>>>> http://carlboettiger.info
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>> already.  --Larry Wall
>>
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